View

Latest hit:Soft Rains, a collection of miniature film sets used to deconstruct genres like '50s melodrama and '80s slasher flicks. Feeds from 50 videocams are channeled through software that edits them into ever-changing vignettes.

Dada meets data: The McCoys' MO is to compile thousands of film clips - from footage they've shot to snippets snagged from Looney Tunes cartoons and TV shows like Starsky and Hutch - break them down into categories, then create short films straight from their databases. "Instead of looking at point, line, and plane - classic Bauhaus design - we're using popular culture," says Jennifer, 36.

Jargon watch: The McCoys turned corporate-speak into an art form with 1999's Airworld. They set up office on the 91st floor of Tower One at the World Trade Center and wrote a Web crawler to harvest marketing language from the sites of big companies to show the absurdity and familiarity of their jargon.

Amazing stories: The McCoys often rely on daily life and sci-fi motifs to spark creativity. For Soft Rains, they turned to Ray Bradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" and its theme of total automation. They've tapped Philip K. Dick's Valis to devise a talking elevator and the original Star Trek series for their latest project, I Number the Stars, in which they plan to catalog all the technological activities aboard the Enterprise.

Next: The British Film Institute commissioned the pair to create an electronic sculpture exploring how the media affects people's lives. With this project, they'll turn the lens on themselves. "It's very abject to include ourselves," says Kevin, 38. "Like little voodoo dolls." - Laura Moorhead